How V-Ray has helped this Australian architectural visualization company create amazing pics and flicks

Architectural visualizations always look amazing, but Australian studio Floodslicer’s computer generated imagery is exceptionally so. Its stills and videos look photographic, not only in their sheer quality, but in terms of how the composition guides the eye around the scene, and their use of light to create a sense of time and place. And this photographic sensibility is no coincidence.

Both Floodslicer’s founders, Daniel Flood and Samantha Slicer, initially worked under architectural photographer John Gollings, who pioneered the use of Photoshop to seamlessly blend real-world photography with scale models.  “A lot of my learning was done on the job,” Daniel says of his time at Gollings’ studio. “I learned by having people around me who could teach some of the aesthetic values I didn’t learn at architecture school.”

This photographic approach helped form Floodslicer’s ethos since it was founded 10 years ago. But as digital imagery has improved, so too has the public’s knowledge of it. “The audience has become more adept at understanding photography,” Daniel says. “They all have Instagram on their phones, or their phones essentially auto-color adjust in front of them. It’s made it harder for photographers to stand out.”

“V-Ray was a revelation. We went from this hard slog, getting the 2D analog information into Photoshop or some other image manipulation software, to becoming a virtual photographer in a 3D digital world.”

Daniel Flood, Floodslicer

Savvy audiences mean FloodSlicer has had to stay on the cutting edge of digital imaging and visual effects technology to convincingly sell virtual imaginings of buildings-to-be, and for this V-Ray has been key.